


i couldn’t utter my love when it counted (ah, but i’m singing like a bird about it now)

by youareiron_andyouarestrong



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Reunions, Tumblr Prompt, high school sweethearts, mentions of - Freeform, parental abandonment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24975640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youareiron_andyouarestrong/pseuds/youareiron_andyouarestrong
Summary: The absolute last person Cassian expected to see at one of the seemingly interchangeable house parties Kes or Shara (or both) were always insisting he attend was Jyn Erso.In truth, Jyn Erso was the last person he expected to see anywhere, since her sudden and abrupt disappearance from their junior year of high school.("I've had a crush on you since 11th grade but you've hated me since that one time" au)
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 6
Kudos: 106





	i couldn’t utter my love when it counted (ah, but i’m singing like a bird about it now)

The absolute last person Cassian expected to see at one of the seemingly interchangeable house parties Kes or Shara (or  _ both _ ) were always insisting he attend was Jyn Erso.

In truth, Jyn Erso was the last person he expected to see  _ anywhere,  _ since her sudden and abrupt disappearance from their junior year of high school. Rumors had swirled, because of course they did--she had killed someone, she had witnessed someone  _ being  _ killed, her dad was a member of the mob who had to go into hiding. Remembering Galen Erso, a gentle, brilliant, soft-spoken man who had always spoken to Cassian so courteously, Cassian had dismissed those rumors. 

What he could not dismiss was her inexplicable change of attitude towards him. Right before her leaving, he and Jyn had been best friends within their larger group of friends and peers. On the verge of becoming  _ more  _ than best friends, until Jyn had started avoiding him. Any attempts at trying to find out why had ended in shouting matches and screaming fights, terrible things that neither of them could take back. The last fight they’d ever had, one so bad he’d stormed out of her house, slamming the door behind him as Jyn had screamed at him  _ to never come back,  _ was the evening right before the Ersos--Jyn and her father--left town. Only to break his heart as comprehensively as it had ever been. Never to be seen again. 

Until now, apparently, in this downtown city university, where Cassian was trying to pursue his graduate degree. 

He was trying to convince him that this couldn’t be Jyn Erso, and was just, in fact her doppelganger. Maybe he was just seeing things, imposing her image over every delicately built, brown haired girl with brilliant green eyes in this terrible lighting.

But no, the closer he looked, the more he  _ knew  _ that this  _ was _ Jyn Erso, there was her perfect upright posture and her full mouth an unimpressed line as she didn’t even attempt to adopt an expression of  _ polite _ boredom as the guy who was talking didn’t stop. A red plastic cup dangled from her hand as she eyed it, and then the talking guy, with a calculating look that Cassian knew all too well; that was Jyn deciding to damn the torpedoes, and full steam ahead.

Without even bothering to politely excuse himself from whatever group he was in, Cassian turned and headed straight towards her, elbowing his way past groups of people talking and chattering like nothing important was about to go down, not taking his eyes off of Jyn for one second, in case she disappeared again-- 

Jyn was edging the arm holding her drink back, the same look on her face as she’d had when they were twelve, and she’d ridden her bike down the ancient, rickety slide at the abandoned park, as their classmates watching had yelled at her to get down and Cassian had waited for her on the other end, steady as a rock. Cassian reached them, with absolutely no idea what he was going to say or do, but at his arrival, Jyn turned to face him, her brow furrowed at this interruption. Then she saw him and even in the dim lighting overhead, Cassian could see the color leave her face.

“Hey,” the other guys said, his monologue coming to a halt, “Do I know you?”

Cassian barely spared him a glance. “No. But I know her.” Jyn was now standing stone still, her arm still suspended in a half throw. “It’s Jyn, isn’t it?” he wondered if she could hear how his heart pounded, almost in time to whatever music was playing. “Jyn Erso? You and I used to go to school together.” 

The color that had drained out of her face now returned in a fiery blush. “Um, yeah.” Her voice wasn’t the same, of course. It was lower, more careful. The way she rolled her lips together as she thought about what she wanted to say next. “I remember you.” The words were careful, not giving too much away. 

“Uh, that’s great,” the other guy said, annoyance threading through his words. “But I was saying--”

“You wanna get out of here?” Cassian asked, still paying him absolutely no mind. All his attention was on Jyn.

Jyn seemed to just realize she was still holding her drink ready to throw, and then lowered her with utmost casualness, like that was her plan all along. “Sure.”

“ _ Excuse me _ ?” the other guy exclaimed, and much to Cassian’s (extremely petty) relief, Jyn didn’t even look in his direction.

“See you around, Brad,” she said, and started making her way through the crowd, ignoring Brad’s sputters of protest. “Bye,” Cassian said, to that poor sucker Brad, may he recover from this indignity, and followed after Jyn.

She met him out on the porch, the balmy August air refreshingly clear of the smell of close bodies, alcohol, and smoke. Some optimistic soul had strung porch lights from the roof, casting the whole scene in an incongruous cozy, golden glow. Jyn tossed out the contents of her drink into the bushes before setting the cup down on the railing, and turning to face him. “Hi.” Like there weren’t almost twelve years of history between them, and the weight of their last meeting wasn’t hovering between them like lead weights balanced on razors. 

“Hi,” Cassian echoed, mostly for lack of anything better to say. “You didn’t like your drink?”

“Room-temperature beer’s not my favorite,” she said.

“Yeah,” Cassian said, “I remember.”

The weights between them fell over and crashed. Jyn hugged her arms around her middle. A self-protective gesture. “So. How’ve you been?”

How has he  _ been _ ? “Good,” Cassian said, with absolutely no clear idea of what the hell he was saying. “I mean, I’ve been fine. I’m studying for my master’s degree at the college.” 

Jyn’s eyes flashed suddenly. “Aren’t you a little old to be at a house party then?”

“I’m a friend of the hosts,” Cassian said, sharpness unexpectedly filtering into his tone. “What about you? What are  _ you  _ doing here?”

“I’m getting my Master’s too,” Jyn said coldly, raising her chin like a declaration of war. “In coding. And  _ I’m  _ friends with the hosts. Shara and Kes.” 

Cassian dragged his hand down his face, trying to process this truly insane amount of information. “Why haven’t I seen you around, then?”

“All my classes are online,” Jyn snapped. “It’s not like I  _ knew _ you’d be here.” 

“I didn’t either,” Cassian snapped right back. Suddenly they were nose to nose again, an eerie echo of that last, terrible fight, inflammatory words flung between them. Cassian almost  _ wanted  _ the fight, the confrontation. Anything was better than this stilted politeness. “You think I just hung around for the past twelve years, thinking of you? Waiting for you to come back?”

“No,” Jyn bit out. “I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t either. It worked.”

“It  _ worked? _ ” Cassian’s voice was now getting into the shouting range, something that  _ never  _ happened to him. “What the hell are you talking about?  _ What  _ worked?”

Jyn went pale again, ghostly under the porch lights. “Nothing. I have to--I have to go.”

She made as if to flee, if Cassian hadn’t planted himself in front of her, like a tree beside a river. “No, Jyn. Not this time. You are not running off without an explanation.  _ Again. _ ”

“I’ll jump over the railing,” Jyn said furiously, actually moving towards it, at least until Cassian got in her way again. “I’ll scream my fucking head off Cassian!  _ Get out of the way!” _

“I’ll get out of the way,” Cassian said through his teeth, “if you give me an explanation of what you just said. What  _ worked _ and what does it have to do with you leaving?”

“I don’t owe you any kind of explanation,” Jyn said, raising her chin again. “Not a damn thing.”

“Yes,” he said coldly, “you do.” A thousand other words swirled on the tip of his tongue. Things he couldn’t say to this almost-stranger. _ You threw me  _ away, _ Jyn, threw _ us _ away. You broke my heart. _ “You disappeared without warning, Jyn. At least tell me where you went,” he said instead. He’d given her his heart and his words once; he would not be so foolish as to do it again. “That you and your dad were  _ safe.  _ I think I’m owed that much.” 

Her jaw worked as she deliberately stared over his shoulder. “We were split up when I was seventeen. My dad is…in New York, last I heard.”

“Last you  _ heard _ ?” Cassian echoed. “What does that mean--”

The front door swung open, noise and laughter jarring them both from their strange, tense little bubble. “Oh, hey Cass!” someone shouted from inside the house, he honestly couldn’t tell who. “What’re you doing out there?”

Cassian half-turned his head to see who it was and that second of distraction was apparently all Jyn needed to vault over the porch railing, exactly like she said she would, and stride off into the night. Leaving him alone,  _ again. _

*

The next week was a bad one. Cassian tried to distract himself with TA-ing for his professors, preparing endlessly for his thesis, trying--and failing--to keep his mind off Jyn. Because Jyn  _ was  _ on his mind. Constantly. Her sudden reappearance and then just as swift departure. How white she’d gone on the porch, after she said  _ it worked.  _

It hurt to remember, but Cassian called up that last fight they’d had, as teenagers, at her house. He’d gone over, determined to find out what Jyn was avoiding him, and at the time, he hadn’t understood the look of sorrow in Galen’s eyes when he’d let Cassian in. How Jyn had refused to even look at him at first, and then she told him that they couldn’t be friends anymore, how she didn’t  _ want  _ to be his friend. Then they’d started yelling at each other, casting up all their ancient arguments and throwing accusations, until he’d stormed away, Jyn’s scream at his back. 

He tried to recall exactly what was said between them. Some parts stood out:  _ god, you’re constantly around me, you’re  _ smothering  _ me, can’t you leave me alone?  _ The rest was a painful blur, only the sense that things had gotten out of hand far, far too quickly. Almost as if… Jyn had done it on purpose. Blown up their friendship and then set the remains on fire. 

_ Why?  _ Why had she done that?

As a teenager, he’d tried to uncover the details surrounding the Erso’s departure. But there was very little  _ to  _ uncover. It wasn’t illegal for a man to sell his house, still furnished, and leave with his teenage daughter without word or warning. They hadn’t even sent for her transcripts from school. Cassian knew that, he’d checked. 

She was just… gone. His best friend, his maybe girlfriend. His  _ almost- _ girlfriend. 

He’d been in and out of love over the past twelve years. He’d been in one other serious relationship. But in the dark of the night, staring at a glowing screen, his mind would wander to a stubborn chin, blazing green eyes and a smile like the sun coming out. The kind of unshakeable faith that could move mountains. He would tell himself he was crazy, of course, for letting a  _ high school _ relationship derail what might’ve become serious, adult ones. There it was. It could not be unsaid, or unthought.

The plain truth of the matter was that no one had understood him quite like Jyn. No one had been  _ willing  _ to wade through the prickly barriers he set around himself and then  _ stay  _ when they had. As though they liked what they saw. 

His other friends did try to help him out of his distraction. A fellow graduate student Kay Esso had been the only one to pragmatically advise Cassian to put Jyn out of his mind. “I can’t imagine pursuing this line of inquiry will resolve anything for you,” he’d said in his blunt, tactless way. “Except to lead to more questions and emotional distress. You’d be better off without that.”

That was the truth, Cassian thought despondently, not that it helped.

Sitting in his tiny office (re: glorified broom closet), he tried to bring his attention to the pile of papers he was helping grade. A quiet knock on the door dragged him from trying to parse this student’s convoluted conclusion. “Come in,” he called without looking up and as the door creaked open, he continued, “How can I help--” Lifting his head, the words faded and died on his tongue.

_ Jyn  _ was standing there, wary and tense, every line of her body speaking of being ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. But she was  _ there, _ vivid and real and present, not a manufacturing of his imagination or repressed longing. 

She made a little gesture to his office. “Can I come in?” her voice was quiet, politely wary. 

Cassian looked around, at the dust motes dancing in the golden air, the cold, half-drunk coffee on the desk. “Ah--uh, yeah. Just let me--” he got up to hurriedly clear the only other chair in the room, which mostly served as a place to stack papers. Jyn waited until it was empty before stalking forward and sitting down in it like a cat who has decided to perch themselves there for their own secret purposes. Caught at cross-purposes, Cassian could do nothing but stare at her for a moment. The lone ray of sunlight seemed to settle on her dark hair like a crown, loving hands. Cassian knew how it felt.

“How did you know where my office was?” Cassian asked. 

She lifted her chin again, that imperious gesture. “I asked around. So,” Jyn continued, in an abrupt manner that he recognized, “I’ve been… doing some thinking about the… last time we met.”

“Have you now,” Cassian said carefully, easing one hip down on his desk. He didn’t like looming over her, but it felt like he needed to take whatever advantage he could get. 

Not that Jyn really seemed to notice, or care. “I have,” she said. “And… you were right about being owed more. Of an explanation, I mean. Why we left. Why…” a momentary hesitation, “why I said those things that I said.”

“I’ve been doing some thinking too,” Cassian said carefully. “About that fight. About why you seemed so determined to get me out of there, by any means necessary.” 

Jyn’s cheeks paled again, her jaw tightened as she stared off into the place over his shoulder again. As though she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. “You did it on purpose,” he said, watching how her throat worked as she swallowed, her hands tightened into fists on her knees. “You--you  _ deliberately  _ started that fight, just to get me out of there. To make me leave.”  _ To make me angry with you.  _

For a moment, Jyn continued to stare into space, seeming to gather herself. Then she looked him dead in the eye, and it was like staring into the sun. All that conviction and fierce determination, blazing light. “Yes,” she said, without a flinch or a stumble. “I did do it on purpose. I didn’t have a choice--it nearly killed me to do it--but I did. And I’m--I’m  _ not sorry _ . I did it to protect you. We were going to leave, and I couldn’t tell you why, so I had to--I had to do something to make you hate me. So it wouldn’t hurt as much.” That unwavering gaze flicked away and Cassian almost gasped at the absence of it. His breathing seemed to have gone with it. 

“It didn’t work,” he said, somehow managing to find his voice. “It still hurt. God, Jyn, you broke my heart.” And it gave him no pleasure to see her flinch this time. “And I still don’t understand  _ why. _ ”

Jyn rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, an old gesture she did when she was trying to think. “To be honest, I’m still a little muddled on the details myself. But what I  _ do  _ know is this--my father found something out about his job. Something big, something bad. He was going to report it to the authorities, but some old co-worker of his--I can’t remember his name--was going to--I think he threatened to harm  _ me,  _ somehow. And my father reached out to my godfather, Saw Gerrera. Do you remember him?”

“Vaguely,” Cassian said, racking his memory. “Wasn’t he a…a reporter of some kind? A whistleblower.” 

“He was that,” Jyn agreed, grimly now. “Honestly, he was less of a reporter and more of a conspiracy theorist when my father reached out to him, but he did help. Saw, I mean. He helped my father and I get away, and started helping my father leak information. And we did that, for a time, but something--something went wrong. And we had to split up. And my father wanted me to go with Saw, but I refused and both men--” now Jyn had to swallow hard, force the words out, “They left me. I was eighteen. And I’ve been on my own, since.” 

Silence fell between them. Jyn’s hands were so clenched into fists so tight Cassian wondered if he would find half moon scars on them, like he did when they were younger and she was angry. Unable to bear it, he knelt in that small space between them, reached out and took her hands in his. Winding his finger around hers tight enough to almost hurt. “I thought I had done something,” he said. “That I had--hurt you, somehow. Or… well, I thought it was a million different things, Jyn.”

A lopsided smile pulled at Jyn’s lips. “It was--it was  _ never  _ you, Cassian. You were the one person I couldn’t bear to leave, and I almost couldn’t forgive my father for making me.” She grimaced. “Then I couldn’t forgive him for other things.” 

There was a lot to unpack there, so Cassian just shifted his hold on her hands, to make them fit a little better. “You said you haven’t spoken to your father in… awhile. Do you--did you need my help with that?”

“No,” Jyn said, quite firmly. “If my dad wants to reach out to me, that’s on him. But I don’t really… have anybody else. Except my roommate, Bodhi.” She glanced at him, and then down at their joined hands. “And, well… you. Maybe.”

The last part of the sentence was said so quietly it could’ve easily been missed. 

Cassian reached out with his free hand, resting the very tip of one finger on her chin. Urging her to look him in the eyes. 

“You have me, Jyn,” he said quietly. “All the way.” The old promise they’d made to each other as children. 

They weren’t children any more, and things were still unresolved, unsaid between them. But there it was, Jyn’s smile, and Cassian felt the world resettle under his feet. 


End file.
